Fundamentals of Direct Current Unit Commitment Optimal Power Flow (DCUCOPF) Scenarios

Welcome to the first electricity markets tutorial. This tutorial is aimed to provide new users with the basic fundamental knowledge in their journey to become expert users of SAInt. The ideas presented here will assist the user in becoming familiar with the operation of SAInt and the typical workflow while using the software. This series of instructions will use the GUI to leverage SAInt to run an energy market optimization, commonly known as power system production cost models. In SAInt these models are referred as a DCUCOPF scenario.

A production cost model or energy market optimization is used to study the economic commitment and dispatch of electricity generators, energy storage, and flexible demand in a power system, considering the system’s technical limitations, operational constraints, and market policies (operation guidelines as user-defined constraints). The objective function of the model is to minimize the production cost of the overall system while supplying the system’s demand and ancillary services.

This series starts off by explaining how to create a power system in the SAInt environment. The first step is creating a network file and adding lines and nodes to construct the system’s topology in the map window. The next step is to add external objects to the nodes, allowing the injection or extraction of energy at the node. At this point, the network file is completed, and it is time to move on to creating the scenario file, which can be used to optimize a day-ahead market. This file includes scenario events and profiles. Events can control or limit the objects and constraints on the system, while profiles (time-dependent data) are used to model the dynamic behavior of different object parameters. The final step in the workflow is to execute the optimization and analyze the results.

Time to complete:

Step 1: Create an Electric Network Model [5 Minutes]
Step 2: Expand the Network Topology [15 Minutes]
Step 3: Add External Objects [15 Minutes]
Step 4: Build a DCUCOPF Scenario [5 Minutes]
Step 5: Define Scenario Profiles [10 Minutes]
Step 6: Design Scenario Events [15 Minutes]
Step 7: Run the Energy Market Optimization [10 Minutes]

A copy of the files required for this tutorial are available in the sub-folder .\Energy Markets\Tutorial 1-2 of the folder Tutorials. Download the tutorials data from the "Model Ready Datasets" category of the community Forum.